The Internet in 2035

In response to the Pew Research Center’s question for 2021

Question: Looking ahead to 2035, can digital spaces and people’s use of them be changed in ways that significantly serve the public good? … If you answered “yes,” what reforms or initiatives may have the biggest impact? What role do you see tech leaders and/or politicians and/or the public playing in this evolution? What could be improved about digital life for the average user in 2035? What current problems do you see being diminished? Which will persist and continue to raise major concerns? If you answered “no,” why do you think digital spaces and digital life will not be substantially better by 2035? What aspects of human nature, internet governance, laws and regulations, technology tools and digital spaces may not much change?

My answer: Back in 2021, almost 5 billion people were connected to the internet (along with billions of objects — cameras, smart cars, shipping containers, bathroom scales and bear collars, to name a few). They thought of the internet as a useful if sometimes problematic technology, a communication utility that brought them news and movies, connections to other humans and convenient at-home shopping.

In 2035, nearly all humans and innumerable animate and inanimate others are online. And while most people still think of the internet as a network for their use, that is an increasingly obvious illusion, a sedating fiction distracting them from the fact that it now makes more sense to consider the internet to be a vast information-digesting organism, one that has already subsumed them into its vast data and communication metabolism.

As nectar is to bees, data is to The Internet (as we’ll refer to its emergent, sovereign incarnation). Rather than producing honey, though, it digests that data into persuasive algorithms, continually perfecting its ability to nudge people in one direction or another. It has learned to rile them up with dissatisfactions they must assuage with purchases of new shoes, a new drink, a trip to Disney or to the moon. It has mastered stoking fear of others, of immigrants, black people, white people, smart people, dumb people — any Other — to muster political frenzy. Its sensors are everywhere and it never tires of learning.

In retrospect it is easy to see the roots of humankind’s subsumption into The Internet. There was the early blithe belief that ads were somehow ‘free,’ that content which we were told would be prohibitively expensive if we paid its real cost was being provided to us gratis, in return for just a bit of exposure to some marketing material. Then came the astronomical fortunes made by tycoons of data harvesting, the bot-driven conspiracies.

By the end of the 2020s, everything from hard news to soft porn was artificially generated. Never static, it was continuously refined — based on detailed biometric sensing of the audience’s response (the crude click-counting of the earlier web long gone) — to be ever-more-addictively compelling.

Arguably the most significant breakthrough in The Internet’s power over us came through our pursuit of health and wellness. Bodily monitoring, popularized by Fitbitters and quantified selfers, became widespread — even mandated — during the relentless waves of pandemics. But the radically transformative change came when The Internet went from just measuring your response to chemically inducing it with the advent of networked infusion devices, initially for delivering medicine to quarantined patients but quickly adapted to provide everyone with personalized, contexu-aware micro-doses of mood-shifting meds: a custom drip of caffeine and cannabis, a touch of Xanax, a little cortisol to boost that righteous anger.

It is important to remember that The Internet, though unimaginably huge and complex, is not, as science fiction might lead you to believe, an emergent autonomous consciousness. It was and is still shaped and guided by humans. But which humans and towards what goal?

The ultimate effect of The Internet (and its earlier incarnations) has been to make power and wealth accrue at the very top. As the attention and beliefs of the vast majority of people came increasingly under technological control, the right to rule, whether won by raising armies of voters or of soldiers, was gained by those who wield that control.

From the standpoint of 2021, this prediction seems grim. Is it inevitable? Is it inevitably grim?

We are moving rapidly in the direction described in this scenario, but it is still not inevitable. The underlying business model of the internet needs to not be primarily based upon personal data extraction. Strong privacy protection laws would be a start. Serious work in developing fair and palatable ways of paying for content must be developed. The full societal, political and environmental costs of advertising must be recognized: We are paying for the internet not only with the loss of privacy and ultimately of volition, but also with the artificial inflation of consumption in an overcrowded, climate-challenged and environmentally degraded planet.

If we allow present trends to continue, one can argue the future is not inevitably grim. We simply place our faith in the mercy of a few hugely powerful corporations and the individuals who run them, hoping that instead of milking the world’s remaining resources in their bottomless status competition, they use their power to promote peace, love, sustainability and the advancement of the creative and spiritual potential of the humans under their control.